Of the medley of concerns circling my mind as I enter my final year at GDS, one of the most pressing is the future of education at the school after I graduate. For the first time, GDS, along with high schools across the globe, is going to graduate a class of seniors who have had artificial intelligence chatbots at their disposal for their entire high school careers. However, teachers should stop encouraging AI as a learning resource, and students should stop using it as one, because it erodes our cognitive and social skills.
There is no escaping AI. In recent years, we have mainly lost our ability to choose when we want to engage with it. Often, it does much of our thinking for us: It makes personalized suggestions on our streaming accounts, signs us into our smartphones or even simplifies a search on Google with an AI overview. Still, when given the opportunity to step away from AI and finally think for themselves in classes, I often hear of high school students continuing to use ChatGPT on their assignments anyway.
There are many teachers around the nation, including at GDS, who already use AI in their classrooms. For example, Spanish teacher Nico Sheets explained that he recommends ChatGPT to students as a helpful study tool. He said that though he understands the environmental harms of AI, he believes generative AI is a timesaver for students. “If there’s one thing I’ve heard from the students over and over again, it’s that there’s no time for anything anymore,” Sheets said. “And I think as much as we push against [AI], we’re doing that to our detriment,” he said. “It behooves us to figure out how to navigate it.”
When Sheets first encouraged me to use ChatGPT as a study resource in Spanish class, I was hesitant to engage. I couldn’t help but wonder what aspects of my critical thinking skills AI was taking away from me. Easy as it may be to rely on ChatGPT to create a mock quiz or summarize information for you, it is more beneficial to do the hard work of sitting with your confusion and learning from your mistakes. Though AI can make learning feel easier, in the long run, our human cognitive effort is essential to developing our analytical and processing skills. Neglecting the mental workout that comes with learning will cause our minds’ muscles to atrophy until we no longer have the strength to truly think for ourselves.
I understand the appeal of ChatGPT. It’s easily accessible, it can create customized study materials and it offers instant feedback. However, at GDS, where we have had access to great educational resources long before the invention of AI, should we still continue to use it as a supplement to the resources we already have?
While AI has not been around long enough for me to have a definitive answer to that question, I would err on the side of avoiding AI use in the classroom. History teacher Emily Landau believes in the importance of learning the human elements of writing and studying. “When it comes to teaching the skills that are fundamental and foundational to writing and critical thinking and discernment,” Landau said, “I think that the shortcuts that are presented by AI are actually undercuts.”
Studying with AI hinders more than our critical thinking skills; it robs us of the social-emotional aspects of learning. When we interact with a chatbot instead of our teachers, we impair the interpersonal skills that are crucial to our development. Unlike our teachers, AI doesn’t have the capacity to support students in times of emotional need. Whenever you are wrestling with a complicated topic, ChatGPT won’t be able to empathize with you and provide personalized support the way a teacher would. Even though it seems like AI is capable of generating some kind of emotion, learning requires a kind of care that only comes from human interaction.
I am not under any impression that AI is going to magically vanish from our education system; I know it is here to stay. But it is essential that we engage properly with the resources we have had access to for decades, for our embrace of the latest tech will do nothing but stunt our ability to think and work for ourselves.